Brimstone by Rosemary Clement-Moore Page A

“Really.”
    “Yes. No amount of tea and honey is going to fix that by tonight.”
    “What are you going to do?” I didn’t have to fake my concern. I’d been making fun of the drama nerds, but I knew how much work they’d put into the project, howimportant it was to them. Even if I wasn’t sympathetic to Thespica (and I wasn’t, really), I felt bad for the rest of them.
    Then someone called from the stage. “She’s here, Mr. Thomas.” The choir teacher stood alongside a vaguely familiar, very nervous-looking, brown-haired girl.
    Mr. Thomas excused himself. “That’s the understudy. If she’s up to it, then we’ll open as planned.”
    He scurried down the aisle. I watched him talk earnestly to the girl, then gesture to the choir teacher, who went to the piano. Understudy Girl started to sing the chicks and ducks song, and though she lacked a fraction of Thespica’s confidence (and by that I mean rampant egotism), she had a pretty voice with nice inflection. It sounded like the day was saved, and the show would go on.
    All praise the Greek god Thespis.

    “It’s just like
Phantom
, isn’t it?” Emily Farber gushed, turned around in her desk to chatter at Lisa and me. It was English class and we were—big surprise—working on our papers.
    The understudy’s name was Suzie Miller. She was in the afternoon AP English class, as well as AP Calculus with Karen and Stanley. Her ascension to stardom was seen as a score for the smart kids, and a much more interesting topic than grammar and subtext.
    “Where the phantom sabotages the prima donna so that Christine could have a chance at the limelight …” Emily sighed. “That is
so
romantic.”
    “I don’t get that movie.” Lisa slumped in her chair. “What’s so hot about a homicidal psychopath?”
    “Well, those eyes, that voice, that face—the part not all melty and gross, I mean.” Emily looked prepared to go on at length.
    “Those shoulders,” I added.
    “Girls!” snapped Ms. Vincent. She really ought to set up a subroutine for that. “You’re supposed to be working on your themes. They are due in a week.”
    Lisa groaned and slithered lower in her seat. “Wake me up when the term is over.”
    She had a theory that term papers were a sort of “get out of teaching free” card. From the start of the assignment to its end, anytime the teacher wanted to dodge lecturing, she could give us class time to work on our papers and expect us to be grateful.
    Personally, I was grateful for any day I didn’t have to listen to Ms. Vincent regurgitate the textbook analysis of literature and expect us to parrot it back without alteration.
    “Hey, Lisa.” I doodled on my paper to make it look like I was working. “Have you ever heard of a student dying, maybe here on campus?”
    She opened an eye and gave me a monocular glare. “You’re not referring to that thing we were talking about last night that we are not going to talk about at school ever, are you?”
    “No. Well, not really.”
    She sighed, then thought about it. “I think there was some kid who killed himself about twenty years ago.”
    “In the gym?”
    “In the band hall.”
    That was not particularly helpful. Then I remembered that geography didn’t seem to be a real issue here.
    “Are you going to the play tonight?” I asked, changing the subject.
    She laid her head on her folded arms. “I wasn’t. But if there’s a chance Gerard Butler might show up in a tux and a half-mask, I’m there.”
    “Dude. Me too.”

    Naturally, since I’d lost the research time that morning, my second opportunity—journalism class—was taken up by a lecture. In lab I discovered that while our high school might have four decades of archived newspapers, the index only went back one and a half.
    “Curses!” I half-slammed the drawer closed. “Foiled again.”
    “What’s the problem?” asked Mr. Allison.
    I blushed slightly, having been caught in a temper tantrum. “What happened to the